Industrial Organization is the area of economics that studies the markets as institutions, the state of competition and strategic interaction among firms, the industrial policy and the business decisions firms make within the market framework. The course looks at the markets from three different perspectives: the economic theory, the applied business perspective and the institutional and legal perspective. The focus of the course is split equally between the economic theory and business perspective but there is a significant legal component incorporated in various topics. The course includes economic modeling, game theory, numerous real life examples and several case studies. We explore interesting topics of market organization such as negotiations, antitrust, networks, platforms, electronic markets, intellectual property, business strategies, predation, entry deterrence and many others.
The basic objective of the course is to enable the student to understand the structure of markets and the nature of strategic competition. Knowledge in this course will be valuable for the students in acquiring managing and governance skills, enriching their understanding of the institutional framework of business, and improve their analytical ability in negotiations.
Prerequisites: The course requires understanding of basic economic modeling, knowledge of intermediate microeconomics (especially production/cost theory), knowledge of basic concepts and methodologies of game theory, intermediate econometrics and basic calculus.

From the lesson

Price discrimination

The topic for this lecture is pricing. In general in economics, we are used in a paradigm in which firms set only one price for each of their products. Sometimes this is indeed the case but, often, we observe that firms charge different prices to different consumers or different occasions or different purchased quantities. In reality, when a firm has some market power and the consumers are each not willing to pay the same for every unit, the firm can price-discriminate to increase its profits. We will analyze the three degrees of price discrimination, tying, bundling and several other methods of advanced pricing. We will also present a brilliant pricing case study with Polaroid.